Gerald’s Game

eavesdropping on conversations about yourself.

With hardly a thought, she raised her hand and curled it into a tube, simultaneously catching the star and sending it the old formula: wish I may, wish I might. Her wish, already well on the way to being granted, was that she be allowed to stay here tomorrow with her Daddy. To stay with him no matter what. just two folks who knew how to stick up for each other, sitting out on the deck and eating Eclipse Burgers a deux… like an old married couple.

As for Dick Sleefort, he apologized to me later, Tom. I don’t rememberif I ever told you that or not-

You did, but I don’t remember him ever apologizing to me.

He was probably afraid you’d knock his block off, or at least try to, Sally replied, speaking again in that tone of voice Jessie found so peculiar-it seemed to be an uneasy mixture of happiness, good humor, and anger. Jessie wondered for just a moment if it was possible to sound that way and be completely sane, and then she squashed the thought quickly and completely. Also, I want tosay one more thing about Adrienne Gilette before we leave the subjectentirely…

Be my guest.

She told me-in 1959, this was, two whole summers later-that shewent through the change that year. She never specifically mentioned Jessieand the cookie incident, but I think she was trying to apologize.

Oh. It was her father’s coolest, most lawyerly “Oh.” And dideither of you ladies think to pass that information on to Jessie…andexplain to her what it meant?

Silence from her mother. Jessie, who still had only the vaguest notion of what “going through the change” meant, looked down and saw she had once again gripped the book tight enough to bend it and once again forced herself to relax her hands.

Or to apologize? His tone was gentle… caressing… deadly.

Stop cross-examining me! Sally burst out after another long, considering silence. This is your home, not Part Two of Superior Court,in case you hadn’t noticed!

You brought the subject up, not me, he said. I just asked-

Oh, I get so tired of the way you twist everything around, Sally said. Jessie knew from her tone of voice that she was either crying or getting ready to. For the first time that she could remember, the sound of her mother’s tears called up no sympathy in her own heart, no urge to run and comfort (probably bursting into tears herself in the process). Instead she felt a queer, stony satisfaction.

Sally, you’re upset. Why don’t we just-

You’re damned tooting I am. Arguments with my husband have a wayof doing that, isn’t that strange? Isn’t that just the weirdest thing youever heard? And do you know what we’re arguing about? I’ll give youa hint, Tom-it’s not Adrienne Gilette and it’s not Dick Sleefort andit’s not the eclipse tomorrow. We’re arguing about Jessie, about our daughter, and what else is new?

She laughed through her tears. There was a dry hiss as she scratched a match and fit a cigarette.

Don’t they say it’s the squeaky wheel that always gets the grease? Andthat’s our Jessie, isn’t it? The squeaky wheel. Never quite satisfied withthe arrangements until she gets a chance to put on the finishing touches.Never quite happy with someone else’s plans. Never able to let well enoughalone.

Jessie was appalled to hear something very close to hate in her mother’s voice.

Sally-

Never mind, Tom. She wants to stay here with you? Fine. She wouldn’tbe pleasant to have along, anyway; all she’d do is pick fights with hersister and whine about having to watch out for Will. All she’d do issqueak, in other words.

Sally, Jessie hardly ever whines, and she’s very good about-

Oh, you don’t see her! Sally Mahout cried, and the spite in her voice made Jessie cringe back in her chair. I swear to God, sometimesyou behave as if she were your girlfriend instead of your daughter!

This time the long pause belonged to her father, and when he spoke, his voice was soft and cold. That’s a lousy, underhanded,unfair thing to say, he finally replied.

Jessie sat on the deck, looking at the evening star and feeling dismay deepening toward something like horror. She felt a sudden urge to cup her hand and catch the star again-this time to wish everything away, beginning with her request to her Daddy that he fix things so she could stay at Sunset Trails with him tomorrow.

Then the sound of her mother’s chair being pushed back came. I apologize, Sally said, and although she still sounded angry, Jessie thought she now sounded a little afraid, as well. Keep her tomorrow,if that’s what you want! Fine! Good! You’re welcome to her!

Then the sound of her heels, tapping rapidly away, and a moment later the snick of her father’s Zippo as he lit his own cigarette.

On the deck, Jessie felt warm tears spring to her eyes-tears of shame, hurt, and relief that the argument had ended before it could get any worse… for hadn’t both she and Maddy noticed that their parents” arguments had gotten both louder and hotter just lately? That the coolness between them afterward was slower to warm up again? It wasn’t possible, was it, that they-

No, she interrupted herself before the thought could be completed. No, it’s not. It’s not possible at all, so just shut up.

Perhaps a change of scene would induce a change of thought. Jessie got up, trotted down the deck steps, then walked down the path to the lakefront. There she sat, throwing pebbles into the water, until her father came out to find her, half an hour later.

“Eclipse Burgers for two on the deck tomorrow,” he said, and kissed the side of her neck. He had shaved and his chin was smooth, but that small, delicious shiver went up her back again just the same. “It’s all fixed.”

“Was she mad?”

“Nope,” her father said cheerfully. “Said it was fine by her either way, since you’d done all your chores this week and-”

She had forgotten her earlier intuition that he knew a lot more about the acoustics of the living room/dining room than he had ever let on, and the generosity of his lie moved her so deeply that she almost burst into tears. She turned to him, threw her arms around his neck, and covered his cheeks and lips with fierce little kisses. His initial reaction was surprise. His hands jerked backward, and for just a moment they were cupping the tiny nubs of her breasts. That shivery feeling passed through her again, but this time it was much stronger-almost strong enough to be painful, like a shock-and with it, like some weird deja vu, came that recurring sense of adulthood’s strange contradictions: a world where you could order blackberry meatloaf or eggs fried in lemonjuice whenever you wanted to… and where some people actually did. Then his hands slipped all the way around her, they were pressed safely against her shoulder-blades, hugging her warmly against him, and if they had stayed where they shouldn’t have been a moment longer than they should have done, she barely noticed.

I love you, Daddy.

Love you, too, Punkin. A hundred million hunches.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The day of the eclipse dawned hot and muggy but relatively clear-the weather forecasters” warnings that low-hanging clouds might obscure the phenomenon were going to prove groundless, it seemed, at least in western Maine.

Sally, Maddy, and Will left to catch The Dark Score Sun Worshippers” bus at around ten o'clock (Sally gave Jessie a stiff, silent peck on the cheek before leaving, and Jessie responded in kind), leaving Tom Mahout with the girl his wife had called “the squeaky wheel” the night before.

Jessie changed out of her shorts and Camp Ossippee tee-shirt and into her new sundress, the one which was pretty (if you weren’t offended by red and yellow stripes almost bright enough to shout, that was) but too tight. She put on a dab of Maddy’s My Sin perfume, a little of her mother’s Yodora deodorant, and a fresh application of Peppermint Yum-Yum lipstick. And although she had never been one to linger before the mirror, fussing with herself (that was her mother’s term, as in “Maddy 5 stop fussing with yourself and come out of there!”), she took time to put her hair up that day because her father had once complimented her on that particular style.

When she had put the last pin into place, she reached for the bathroom light-switch, then paused. The girl looking back at her from the mirror didn’t seem like a girl at all, but a teenager. It wasn’t the way the sundress accentuated the tiny swellings that wouldn’t really be breasts for another year or two, and it wasn’t the lipstick, and it wasn’t her hair, held up in a clumsy but oddly fetching chignon; it was all of these things together, a sum greater than its parts because of… what? She didn’t know. Something in the way the upsweep of her hair accented the shape of her cheekbones, perhaps. Or the bare curve of her neck, so much sexier than either the mosquito-bumps on her chest or her hipless tomboy’s body. Or maybe it was just the look in her eyes-some sparkle that either had been hidden before today or had never been there at all.

Whatever it was, it made her linger a moment longer, looking at her reflection, and suddenly she heard her mother saying: Iswear to God, sometimes you behave as if she were your girlfriend insteadof your daughter!

She bit her pink lower lip, brow Burrowing a little, remembering the night before-the shiver that had gone through her at his touch, the feel of his hands on her breasts. She could feel that shiver trying to happen again, and she refused to let it. There was no sense shivering over stupid stuff you couldn’t understand. Or even thinking about it.

Good advice, she thought, and turned off the bathroom light.

She found herself growing more and more excited as noon passed and the afternoon drew along toward the actual time of the eclipse. She turned the portable radio to VNCH, the rock-and-roll station in North Conway. Her mother abhorred “NCH, and after thirty minutes of Del Shannon and Dee Dee Sharp and Gary “US” Bonds, would make whoever had tuned it in (usually Jessie or Maddy, but sometimes Will) change to the classical music station which broadcast from the top of Mount Washington, but her father actually seemed to enjoy the music today, snapping his fingers and humming along. Once, during The Duprees” version of “You Belong to Me,” he swept Jessie briefly into his arms and danced her along the deck. Jessie got the barbecue going around three-thirty, with the onset of the eclipse still an hour away, and went to ask her father if he wanted two burgers or just one.

She found him on the south side of the house, below the deck on which she stood. He was wearing only a pair of cotton shorts (yale phys ed Was printed on one leg) and a quilted oven-mitt. He had tied a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He was crouched over a small, smoky sod fire. The combination of the shorts and the bandanna gave him an odd but pleasant look of youth; Jessie could for the first time in her life see the man with whom her mother had fallen in love during her senior summer.

Several squares of glass-panes cut carefully out of the crumbling putty in an old shed window-were piled up beside him. He was holding one in the smoke rising from